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Since the USA election I’ve been in a state of confusion. In the days leading up to the election I genuinely didn’t think that the American people would vote for Donald Trump again. The mistake I made was in overlooking the thousands of years of research, analysis and peer-reviewed writing that humanity has done into the context of just such political moments, instead allowing myself to be led by new-media influencers and old-media celebrities whose proclamations were more often than not bias-reaffirming assumption-laden oversimplifications. Put simply I fell into the internet trap of thinking that anything existentially important can be explained at x1.5 time speed, or in 288 characters, or in a pithy YouTube short.
The reality is that just as the world doesn’t dance to the rhythm of 24 hour rolling news, nor does it function based on what can and can’t be monetised in Silicon Valley. I was quite clear before the election that I believed the shift to openly oligarchic rule, which is what has happened in the Republican party, is not much more than the most recent step in a very long and complicated journey.
During the COVID-19 pandemic we saw a very clear “counter-revolutionary” Malthusian response from large sections of the political establishment. Previous to this we saw the shift from traditional two party politics to the neo-liberal consensus, travelling from one administration to the next in the UK from Thatcher to Cameron and in the US from Reagan to Obama. A process that much like the current gear shift was presented as democratic and in the best interests of the “masses” at the time. Each of these political shifts were simply steps in a journey to where we find ourselves today, in Washington, London, Valencia and Gaza.
Before I go on I think it is worth repeating what I have been arguing for two decades now, that anti-democratic valves are built into the very structure of the democratic processes in the US, and for that matter most of the “democratic” countries around the world. This was my starting point for unravelling my clearly flawed assumption that Trump wouldn’t win because the majority of Americans would never vote for him.
By turning off YouTube for a couple of days and picking up an academically-argued and peer-reviewed critical analysis of a specific historical political event in the form of a book with no pictures I remembered something important. The nuances and behaviours of complex systems involving millions of people that have lived for decades in massive communities with contrasting cultures can not be effectively explained in a 2 minute interview. And to expect them to be is opening oneself up to be misinformed.
It was then that I realised that the mistake was mine, but not in thinking that the American people wouldn’t vote for Trump before the election. But rather in thinking that they had voted for him after the election. At last count Donald Trump’s Republican party received just over 76.6 million votes. The current population of the United States is just over 346.1 million people. That works out at a little over 22% of the population. Put simply the vast majority of America did not vote for Donald Trump. And while a small proportion did, those people are outnumbered over 3 to 1 by those that didn’t. Once you begin to factor in the “safeguards” like the Electoral College, Citizens United, and of course the now increasingly extremist Supreme Court of the US, the idea that the 2024 presidential election represents the voice of the American people would be comical if it wasn’t so tragic.
When you start taking into account exactly how undemocratic our political systems actually are, it really isn’t that surprising what kind of people manage to clamber their way to the top of them. Is it any wonder that a highly selective and anti-democratic process co-opted by corporations and the super-rich only ever seems to deliver attention-seeking sociopaths willing to do anything to maintain the inequality that benefits those that placed them there.
And while there really are countless examples of this, Matt Gaetz’s recent political career is fast becoming a particularly egregious example of this sort of anti-democratic sociopathy.
Gaetz was a Republican congressman, and all that entails, until he resigned on Wednesday 13th November when Trump said that he would nominate him to be his Attorney General. This resignation, apparently coincidentally, stopped the House Ethics Committee issuing the final report on their investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct by Gaetz. If you didn’t already know Matt Gaetz is a far-right Trump minion who was always likely to insert himself into Trump[‘s administration] even after having found himself neck deep in allegations of criminal behaviour for years.
In Gaetz’s defence he clearly has some legal expertise, or at least an understanding of the US legal system. After having been investigated for the accusation that he had conspired in the trafficking of and having sex with minors, investigations in which his alleged co-conspirator has ended up going to prison for, Gaetz has managed to find himself walking free without any charges being brought against him. And now, even the supposedly democratic government oversight of misconduct enquiry has been dropped. There is still some hope that the report will be made public, but that would required the government establishment to remember that they are meant to represent all of the people, not just the ones on the lobbyists payroll.
So why is this important, when the electoral process has just declared a multiple times convicted felon, who had amongst other things been found guilty by a jury for a sexual assault, accused by many women of sexual misconduct, who has declared bankruptcy multiple times and who Geoffrey Epstein described as his closest friend, as president of the USA. This is important because “IF” Matt Gaetz was in fact guilty of the allegations he was accused of, appointing him to Attorney General gives him control over the government department that holds the details of his criminal investigation including the names addresses and files of his accusers. This in an administration that has stated time and time again that it will pursue and silence its accusers and enemies.
Put simply, this is what authoritarianism looks like in practice. A small group of people conspiring to brutalise the rest of us with no legal or procedural recourse to stop them. The super-rich and the corporations, post-Citizens United, can effectively buy political power without ever having to enter a popularity competition. And with it comes the underlying classism, misogyny and racism of modern “democracies” that is as rampant as it ever was, allbeit a little more effectively hidden up until this most recent election.
The proposed appointments by this incoming administration are a shopping list of sycophants, hate-mongers and robber barons. And much as I would like to take some degree of solace from the idea that this administration is an aberration, it really isn’t. In an historical context it is very much an entirely predictable continuation of the history of the “United States of America” and the European colonialism that preceded it. But as I have said so often in recent years to friends and families, politics and history are not moments in time so much as they are more akin to a tide ebbing and flowing.
My first published serious political article was 21 years ago in response to the 15th February 2003 anti-war march, when tens of millions of people around the world marched in protest against the invasion of Iraq. We didn’t stop the invasion or the catastrophe that followed. But what we did do is tell the global elite that we couldn’t be cowed and we wouldn’t silently acquiesce to their oppression. But perhaps most importantly we came together and have stayed together and refused to stop fighting to make the world a better place for everyone. Now more than ever we all need to remind ourselves that the fight against oppression and exploitation didn’t start 6 months ago with the American people. Humanity has been fighting against the worst excesses of the worst among us since the beginning of time, and it is far from over.